Friday, July 15, 2016

Another Day, Another Atrocity

So once again Europeans have seen another vicious, grotesque terrorist attack in the heart of Europe. Even one picture here speaks a thousand words about this monstrous horror.

See here and here. If things go on like this, it seems France may well face a permanent state of emergency. If it gets much worse, it will be more like low level civil war in a major European country. As Europe descends into chaos, even millennial cultural leftists and other regressive left lunatics will have to face reality, and this is the issue that will bring many of them to their senses.

Brace yourself for a torrent of regressive left insanity and vile apologetics which will ignore all the serious issues:

(1) isn’t EU open borders, or open borders of any kind, insanity at this point?

(2) why does the West need mass immigration of people whose communities are breeding grounds of this extremism? Why on earth should Europe continue to let in 100,000s of people, whether they are refugees or mere economic migrants, when this will inevitably let in more terrorists? (In case you thought the migrant crisis ended, it hasn’t; it just shifted to some extent to Italy: see here, here, and here.)

I imagine even many left-wing people, even some of the regressive left, must be quietly asking these questions.

Regressive leftism will implode over the coming years as people, especially the young, see how catastrophic cultural leftism and multiculturalism have been. Many will no doubt feel angry and betrayed when their utopian delusions implode.

When this happens, I honestly hope these people will not defect to the right. They will need a sensible but hard-headed left-wing politics to fall back on. People who can intelligently point out what went wrong, without pushing conservative economics or the standard right-wing agenda.

21 comments:

In israel because where we are living in the middle east specially after the arab winter (which transformed secular nationalistic divtatorships into radical islamic ones) people here even millenials and even people on the left started slowly but steady to reject left regressivm.

I am as millenial (and a tortured student of economics) see the change here myself where many people of my age change their views.

But the problem economically is that in israel most of the people are like peter hitchens.

They support social democratic policies without even understand what keyensianism is so sadly the media always brainwash people with deficit hawkary and another neoliberal propaganda.

For example we have continous deflation for 2 years and a slump in exports (israel is export led growth economy) and the media always braging about how we should open our agriculture sector for free trade and how we should "increase productivity" (aka lower corporate taxes) no mention of full emploent and deficit spending at all.

So the problem here is that the people here captured in TINA mentality led by famous (by israel standards) hardcore new classical professor omer moav (he is professor in warwick university btw).

To be honest i felt that neoclassical economics is fishy but before i saw your blog for example i never even knew what is post keynesianism about so thank you for that.

But its just shows the problem and the problem is that the media make people ignorant about economic alternative to neoclassical economics.

Thats the biggest obstacle of the old left to revive people think that mainstream economists represent science while they represent the holy gospels of marshal and robert lucas jr.

Ohh also i have interesting thing to tell you china is not the only country which manipulate its currenccy.

Our central bank since its was led by (stanely fisher currently vice chairman of the fed which is strange for mainstream economist) literaly print shekels and buy with them dollars in order to devalue the shekel (the central bank already bought more than 100 billion dollars with printed shekels).

"Our central bank since its was led by (stanely fisher currently vice chairman of the fed which is strange for mainstream economist) literaly print shekels and buy with them dollars in order to devalue the shekel "

Some nice mercantilism at work, Daniel. Nobody would blame you for that. lol

1. The man involved had a known criminal record and has been involved in armed attacks before.

2. In previous attacks in France and Belgium, the suspects were already monitored by intelligence and suspected to be planning attacks.

As much as I hate to say it, there is too much sign of wilful negligence by some European countries about these kind of things. In US, Russia, or Israel, anyone under these suspicions would never to get to carry out their plans.

This is just wrong as daf as the USA goes. The Orlando guy was investigated, other guys on the radar in the US too. France is actually unusually vigilant and forceful in its policing. Cannot speak to Israel or Russia.

I'm pro open borders (i.e., people should be free to seek a life wherever) but against mass migration of the sort we're seeing. I don't think the latter necessarily follows from the former, though. If anything, the main reason there's a "mass" aspect to it is that for many of these people their place of birth has become virtually unlivable.

Considering Europe's role in many of those situations, it seems unthinkably cruel to shut people out now. "You break it, you buy it."

(Though in fairness, this would mean the USA should really be doing more to shoulder the burden, too.)

True open-borders would entail the movement of hundreds of millions or even billions of overwhelmingly third world people to a few liberal Western nations. It shouldn't need explaining why this is an apocalyptically bad idea.

By the way, the great majority of these interventions were opposed by the European public (even though our leaders compulsively lied to get us in) so if anyone should be punished, it's the warmongering Western elites. Maybe flooding the Bush, Clinton and Blair neighborhoods with some of the vibrant youths that they wish to impose on White working-class areas would be a good start.

You hit squarely on the problem in your last sentence. Part of the reason why little has been done about mass immigration either in Europe or the United States is because the economic elites were largely immune from the negatives of mass immigration. They could afford to live in affluent neighborhoods where they were protected from the negative impact of mass immigration while benefiting from cheap labor. It is no wonder that most regressive leftists are from affluent, educated backgrounds.

Alain de Benoist got it right in "Immigration: the Reserve Army of Capital."

Great piece by de Benoist. The immigration issue actually makes a lot of sense in Marxist terms. It is a plutocratic policy pursued by the economic, social and political elites for their own benefit, who are able to insulate themselves from its negative consequences and shift the burden onto the native working-class/proletariat. The globalist right support it because they want low wage labour and the radical left support it because they hate the nation-state. Simple really.

The prospects for a change in policy by the current elites do not look favourable though. Merkel's actions in 2015 suggest that our leaders are totally out of touch with reality, wedded to a lunatic anti-Western ideology. We are in a truly desperate situation if we're counting on a volte-face from this corrupt gang.

Excellent post. The apologetics will be interesting, with no guns to blame, but they will flow.I know a lot of leftist virtue signallers who are what I call "two city" types. By which I mean this. We will lose a city to terrorism, via a bomb, or dirty bomb, or bio attack at some point. That will not convince them. They will not be convinced until we lose a second city, if then.If you think this is nuts consider Japan in 1945. One bomb was not enough. The Japanese government was equally divided even after Nagasaki, and it took the emperors intervention. I bet you have some three city posters here.

(1) Open Borders is indeed insane. Chang has pointed out that there's no true "Free Markets" in any situation that the State regulates immigration. I assume that would be either restrictions or non-restriction, since both politically impact wages.

(2) The countries who are causing the refugee problem in the 1st place are the ones who should be the 1st to step up and take in the people feeling that mess OR they should stop being the cause of it to begin with. Sorry/not sorry.

(3) Asking about who we're funding & why should be the #1 question in all these situations.

I am quite suspicious of expressions like "cultural leftism" "multiculturalism"... may be what they refer to and why it is wrong is clear in the anglo-saxon world but to me it is a kind of bogeyman people invoke when they want to express contempt towards entire "communities" without being criticized for their dangerous lack of precision. As to the many political failures behind the success of those attacks, austerity (which has a clear cut definition) should not be forgotten : for months dedicated public servants like the judge Marc Trevidic warned that they had not enough staff to defuse all the threats, so did intelligence officers . Unfortunately no one cared to listen to their demand and proposals, at least among those in power.Vague cultural considerations and rhetoric about "western values" and blabla should not prevent us from seeing the main issues, namely :- ill conceived NATO war mongering in the middle east (isis is a direct byproduct of the collapse of the irakian state after US invasion)- immoral and dangerous alliance with wahabite regimes from the gulf- insufficient funding and may be unfunctionnal organisation of our security agencies (with a high tech fetishism which is under harsh criticism from many an intelligence specialist)- unemployment in particular for young / unskilled workers (who often happen to be immigrants children)(That being said I am totally opposed to open borders policies but mainly on plain economical grounds)For those who can read french here is an interesting piece of analysis :http://www.medelu.org/Nice-et-apres-Pour-une-reponse

I think those terms are problematic because they are not precise enough to help sorting things out and if possible cool down the discussion over those sensitive subjects. Just as many fuzzy "-isms" do. (Remember the last time you tried to talk some sense into a stubborn conservative who did not want to listen to your documented criticism of neoliberalism and austerity because "collectivism is evil and that's the end of it".)If it means respecting others habits and preferences provided they do not hurt someone else's freedom I think it is plain common sense liberalism. Vegans, muslims, jews, christians (on some days) refuse to eat things I personaly enjoy. No problem. They can even try to persuade me to follow the rules they follow so long as they do not resort to anything else than arguments.If multiculturalism means eithera) that citizens of a given country are never entitled to depart from open borders policiesb) that what people owe to each other is primarily defined by their so called cultural background so that different backgrounds imply different rights (if for example same sex marriage was restricted to people stemming from secular families)it plainly contradicts a) the basics of democracy b) of the rule of law.Does anyone really stand for that ?